


Selective Hearing

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-30
Updated: 2011-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:44:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marilyn's right, of course. The dilution wasn't the first time Mark plotted against Eduardo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Selective Hearing

**Author's Note:**

> Watching the Sean Parker dinner scene again made me want all the OT3 fic in the world.
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/101592.html).

-

 

They settle.

Of course they settle. Marilyn made a very valid point. _Likability._ They really should have brought that up first thing; Mark would have signed the settlement right then and there, just with that word -- _likability_ \-- and it could have spared them a great deal of waving all that shit in the breeze.

They tab where they want him to sign, little blue arrows on a stack of papers so thick it requires a heavy-duty staple, and he does; a sharp scrawl, the Z the only distinguishable part of his signature, the rest of it just a dismissive suggestion of letters, like they're not worth the energy to make them legible. When he's done, he straightens, steps away from the table, his fingertips tension-white from where they were clutching the grip of the pen too tightly. There's a knot between his shoulder blades, but that's been there for days.

He watches Eduardo sign in all the same places. Mostly, he watches the tick in Eduardo's jaw as he clenches his teeth, a repetitive grind.

_Do you still wear a retainer at night?_ Mark is tempted to ask and break the dark, graveside silence. _You got it at your father's insistence when you were seventeen; it's army-green and it was supposed to break you from that habit. Treating the symptoms, never the problem, that was your dear old dad._

When Eduardo's finished signing the settlement, they set another set of papers in front of him; Marilyn slides it across the table, tentative and almost apologetic. The nondisclosure agreement. 

Eduardo's expression doesn't even flicker; he bends at the waist to put his pen to them, too.

And that's it. Someone dressed in grey gathers up the papers, bundling them together with a giant clip. The lawyers are murmuring their platitudes to each other, and Mark hears his mother's voice, prompting from the back of his mind, _why don't you shake hands with the nice man, Mark, and say thank you?_ Shaking hands over a settlement; symbolic, he thinks derisively, a relic of an medieval honor system, look, see, I'm not carrying any weapons. I'm shaking your hand, not stabbing you in the back, see? See?

He extends his hand, sort of half in Eduardo's space. He can pretend not to see it, if that's how he wants to play it.

Eduardo's eyes flick down. There's ink smudged by Mark's nails. Fancy fountain pens; what's wrong with a Bic? Does it somehow make an agreement more valid if it's signed with a pen that costs more than three month's worth of Cup Noodle?

Eduardo takes Mark's hand.

And then he twists his wrist hard, stepping forward as Mark's arm bends backwards -- instinctively seeking to relieve the pressure -- and Eduardo shoves him hard up against the window, where he stays, shoulders pinned back against the glass, pain electric and immediate. The Junipero Serra hills stretch out in the distance, behind a flood of trees; you can see the Stanford bell tower from up here, and the traffic on El Camino flashing by in blinks of sunlight, and if you know what you're looking for, you can see the roof of the office building where all of Mark's team are working. 

Eduardo's eyes are narrowed against the light, pupils shrunk to points. Mark doesn't look away.

Filtering in from the edges like static, there's noise, too, raised voices; Sy is shouting at Gretchen ( _\-- control your client for five seconds?! We were almost through!)_ and Gretchen's yelling at Eduardo, and Ella's hammer-sized heels go darting out into the hallway, presumably to call security, but Eduardo is silent, absolutely silent, pressed in so close Mark can see his nostrils flare minutely with each breath, the flick of his eyelids.

With the hand that isn't holding Mark's wrist uncomfortably between their bodies, he grabs Mark by the collar of his jacket and shakes him -- once, twice, rattling his bones and bird-like angles against the glass, loud enough to make Sy jerk in like he's going to separate them, like they're schoolboys instead of grown-up businessmen. It isn't a violent hold, not laptop-smashing violent; Mark recognizes the intent, the question, the unspoken behind the white-knuckled grip, because Eduardo was his best friend before he was his CFO, his best friend before he was his plaintiff, his best friend even before he was the weight on the other side of his Kirkland bed. That's more important than six hundred million dollars, and even Mark (who has the social graces of a gnat) knows that.

Eduardo shakes him again. He's trembling, Mark can feel it, and that's what finally makes him stretch up, stretch into Eduardo's space and set his hand to the back of his neck. He pulls them together, foreheads and the bridges of their noses and their collarbones crossed against each other like a coat of arms. Eduardo's free arm lashes across his back and holds them there, in that place.

They stay like that, up against the window with ink still drying on the settlement and in the creases under their nails. Eduardo has them here, and Mark wouldn't move even if he was able.

He doesn't say anything, so neither does Eduardo.

Actually, there is nothing _to_ say.

Eduardo _can't_ say anything.

Not legally.

_You're going to have to pay a little extra,_ goes Marilyn's voice from memory, and his eyes dart around the curve of Eduardo's face that hemispheres half his vision. She meets his gaze from the other side of the board table, and he can see the moment comprehension dawns on her -- that last piece of information about the "emotional testimony" that she, nor any of the other lawyers, ever thought to ask for, and Eduardo noses into him some, an easy pantomime of intimacy. A sigh escapes him; frustrated and hurt and everything in between, and Mark closes his eyes against the sound of it.

_If they say one bad word about you in public, you'll own their wife and kids._

He balls his hand into a fist at the nape of Eduardo's neck, kneejerk, because that's exactly what the problem is. They will not see each other again after this. Or if they do, they won't be able to talk -- there's no _fixing_ a nondisclosure agreement. There's no possibility of being friends again, not when Eduardo cannot speak to Mark or about Mark or about himself and Mark without the threat of facing legal action.

_You have your money, your shares, your pride, and your honor restored,_ he thinks. Eduardo's grip on his wrist is still bruisingly tight, crushed between them. _But you've lost me and you know it._

So that's what this is, this thing that's half embrace and half middle school judo hold; it's a thank you and a fuck you and a good-bye all at once, while they still have the time.

 

-

 

There's an outdoor patio on the second floor of the law offices, because apparently the building architects assumed that, much like temperate-climate plants, lawyers need a certain amount of sunlight every day. As far as Mark can tell, it's more used as a sunnier kind of break room, judging by the number of cigarette butts that litter the outside edge of the railing.

On the other end of the phone line, he hears a sigh, a little tinny, like maybe he's been left on speakerphone while she moves about. "So that's it?"

"Yeah," he goes, picking at the flaking white paint on the railing. It chips away under his fingertips, leaving little jagged gaps of exposed metal. And then, not quite an apology, "I didn't have any other contingency plans."

"Mmhmm," she replies. Like she's trying to gentle it, she tells him, "You fucked it up. For both of us."

He sucks in a breath to reply, not knowing what he's going to say (not like it's going to stop him from saying it, though,) but then he hears the door pop open behind him and someone come out onto the patio. It's Marilyn; she only has one pair of dress shoes and he'd be a lousy excuse of a client if he couldn't at least tell his lawyers apart by their footsteps by now. He's pretty sure the sound of approaching heels on linoleum is going to spike his anxiety for _months_ after this.

"I'll call you back," he says into the phone, perfunctory, and as he slides the phone away from his ear to thumb the end-call button, he hears her reply, which might be "okay," or might be "please don't," he doesn't know.

"Sorry," goes Marilyn, stepping up to join him at the railing. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

He shrugs at her, pocketing his phone and turning to face her. There are still grimy bits of paint and dirt on his fingers, so he brushes those off on his pants, in case he needs to shake her hand again or something. How many niceties does he have to observe before everyone just leaves him alone?

Marilyn's eyes flick to his wrist, the one Eduardo wrenched around. It's started to swell noticeably. If he has any interest in being able to type tomorrow, he should probably go home and ice it. But. He'll deal with that when he comes to it, he supposes.

"I apologize for the show we put on back there," he says stiffly, and she blinks in reply, a startled lift of her eyelashes. "It ... it wasn't meant for you."

"I was grateful for it, to be honest," she says before he can turn his back on her. "It filled in a lot of the blanks in your story for us. But there's still one thing I'm curious about, if you wouldn't mind. It has nothing to do with the case," she elaborates, catching the narrowing of his eyes. "That's behind us. It's just ... I'd like to know."

"Right, because that's the important thing." That comes out more cutting than Mark means it to.

Marilyn purses her lips, but moves along, because what does Marilyn Delpy, _voir dire_ specialist and newbie lawyer, care about the sarcastic in an outs of Mark Zuckerberg? She's not carrying her clipboard, or anything to take notes with; just her, in suit and heels and her standard-issue handbag slung over one shoulder, ready to go home but coming to find him anyway because she doesn't like loose ends. 

He gestures for her to go ahead, and she drags in a breath to say, "Your phone records from the summer you were in the Webster street house."

"You pulled those?" Mark lifts his eyebrows.

She fixes him with a steady look. "We pulled everything that was pertinent to the case, Mark. What we used in the depositions was only a fraction of the research we did on you."

"Is there such thing as a belated feeling of violation," he goes in an undertone, in a bid to make her smile, and she rewards him with one; slim, white, aimed more at their shoes than at him, before she speaks again.

"During that summer, you called Eduardo's girlfriend more frequently than you called him." He straightens up before he catches himself, and the look she cuts at him then is shrewd. "It didn't seem worth bringing up, since we were more interested in the visit Eduardo made in early July than why you wanted to talk to his girlfriend while he was away. But, in light of ... recent revelations, I find it ... interesting."

"None of that was a question," Mark points out. "But I know what you're getting at. You want to know which of us was the other woman, and did Christy know that I was sleeping with Eduardo, too."

She tilts her chin up. "If you want to take the prurient angle on it, yes."

Mark smiles to himself, and fishes his phone back out. When it wakes from sleep, it still shows the log from the call Mark just hung up on. He shows it to her.

_Outgoing call  
Christy  
00:07:35  
19:31 August 14, 2005_

"Did you even ask her for her deposition?" he asks.

"We tried," says Marilyn, who flits her eyes back and forth between Mark's own, like she's rapidly reading some kind of text. "We had countless evidence against your likability, but considerably less against his. The ex-girlfriend seemed like a good option. She refused."

"Hmm, yeah." He glances out across the patio. Down on the street, a car attempting to turn right onto University Ave is stuck in place by heavy foot traffic, which remains oblivious to the "do not walk" sign. Mark watches it inch slowly forward until it's in danger of clipping the legs of the pedestrians. "She's mad at me," he looks back at Marilyn, smiling thinly. "In a cold kind of way. I was supposed to save us."

And _there_ it is, the light bulb going on behind Marilyn's eyes.

"She was your girlfriend," she states, and, belatedly, a little less sure, "Too."

Mark smiles.

"I'm sure you'll understand why we didn't want to drag that out in front of everybody," he goes, and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. "I'll tell you why you think something in the story doesn't add up, Ms. Delpy. The dilution was not the first time we plotted against Wardo."

 

-

 

"So let me get this straight," says Christy. She's sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping off her mascara. She looks at the smears of black on the little fold of cloth when she's finished, twisting her mouth a little in distaste (which she always does, much to Mark's bemusement; what's she expecting to be on there, anyway?) before lobbing it at the trash.

Which ... had not been there yesterday, actually. When did someone go out and buy trash cans for everybody?

They've only been in the Webster street house for a week; they have absolutely no toilet paper and no bedsheets, but plenty of Cup Noodle, Red Bull, and -- for some reason -- paper clips, and the wireless is working, so really, as far as Mark is concerned, the rest of superfluous. 

Christy finished her last exam at Harvard four days after Mark, and she still has a week before she and Eduardo are able to move into their apartment in New York, so she's come out to California ("please, like you need to twist my arm to get me to show my face in Silicon Valley," she laughed, flashing her cheesiest Valley girl smile,) because she has as much invested in Facebook as any of them. And while she leans more to the marketing side of her CS major rather than systems like Mark, she keeps up with Mark's stream of consciousness just fine, which is a nice change from Eduardo's confused, sideways-smiled, "sounds great!"s; something Mark didn't even realize he wanted until she was around.

She's clever, quick on the uptake, is a hell of a lot more generally likable than Mark, and, furthermore, she's _social._ She's kind of the perfect representative sample of the target demographic of a social networking site, and Mark wants her to be Facebook's test subject forever.

But before she was any of that, she was the girl who asked Eduardo out for drinks.

"Let me get this straight," she says again, looking over her shoulder at him, her eyes thinned. "You want me to drive him out?"

"Drive him _here,"_ Mark stresses, sitting up to the protesting groan of the bare mattress. "Wardo needs to be here in California, Christy, not in New York. You know I'm right."

"Couldn't you just _ask_ him?" she goes, twisting around to face him and folding her legs over each other the way Mark remembers doing in kindergarten, criss-cross applesauce.

Mark makes a noise, meaning, _yeah, but Wardo,_ and _he'll just think I'm trying to stir up the advertising thing again,_ and _have you ever seen me politely, meaningfully ask for something and actually get it? No,_ but trips over trying to get all of that out at once.

Christy understands him anyway, because she wrinkles her nose and mumbles, "Right, yeah, that won't work. What do you suggest I do, then?"

"Make him decide to come to California on his own." She tilts her head in question, and he continues, "By which I mean I want you to make him hate everything New York stands for."

"Convince him to give up the internship?"

"Right," goes Mark, who'd forgotten about the internship until she mentioned it. "Recommend seedy restaurants, cancel his plans with his friends -- use Facebook to do it, he doesn't know how it works yet -- do everything you can to make New York a nightmare for him."

"Sounds diabolical," she muses. "I'm not sure I'm ready to be that evil."

Mark shrugs at her. "Of course we are."

This earns him a smile. "Of course we are," she agrees, eyebrows ticking up on the plural pronoun. She settles back into her spine, pulling her hair over her shoulder to check the ends, which she always does when she's thinking hard.

"We need him here, Christy," Mark murmurs, rocking into her space. He catches her eyes and holds it. "You've always sided with me before."

"You have a tendency to be right. It's annoying because you're never gracious about it," she goes, dry. "I just ... I'm trying to think if there's a way to do it without him winding up hating _us,_ too."

Mark dismisses this. "It's Wardo. He's existentially incapable of hating us. You're his girlfriend and I'm his --"

"Pet genius?"

"I was going to say business partner."

"I'm sorry, how many business partners do you sleep with again?"

Mark throws his head back, barking laughter.

"Tell you what," goes Christy, rocking up onto her knees and grabbing onto his shoulder for balance. "I could be his jealous harpy. I'll hound him to the point where he's afraid to leave his own apartment. Have you seen my crazy eyes? They go a little something like this," and she swoops in close, eyes flaring open to where it seems like the whites of them take up half her face.

He yelps, covering them with the palm of his hand. "Jesus, no, put them away," and she falls into him, laughing.

There's a purple octopus painted on the wall, stretching its tentacles up the ceiling towards the overhead light, reaching and wanton. It's courtesy of Andrew McCollum, their resident graphic design artist, who goes a little crazy with his Prismacolors when he isn't mandated by Zuckerberg law to be wired in. He's usually out by the pool in swim trunks and sunglasses, laptop balanced across his thighs and earbuds snaking up to his ears, like he'd never heard of the nerdy Asian kid stereotype or something. Mark's seen his scrap notebooks; designs for giraffes firing machine guns, Dennis the Menace vomiting rainbows, and Twinkies with cat whiskers, so he supposes he's glad the octopus is the only thing that got painted in his bedroom. It's relatively tame, and kind of endearing, once you get past the way it makes Mark's room look like it's _made of tentacles._

Christy studies it over the top of his head, lips pulled to one side in amusement, and Mark _knows_ she's about two seconds away from making a joke about Octopussies -- he can see the gears in her head turning, so he pulls her in with a hand at the small of her back and kisses her.

It's not their first kiss, not now, but it is the first time Mark's kissed Christy without Eduardo being there, laughing at them and going, _if you try to unfasten her bra from that angle again, I'm going to take a picture and post it to Facebook and create its own account just so people can mock it, now move over and leave the undressing to someone who's actually smooth,_ so it's weird for a moment, that empty, quiet space.

But when Christy had arrived earlier today, Dustin unplugged long enough to explain to the interns that _this is Christy. She's Eduardo's girlfriend. They have loud, kinky sex, but only at the times that are most inconvenient for poor unsuspecting roommates who just want to be left to watch the Flight of the Conchords in peace._

And Andrew'd looked over the tops of his sunglasses and gone, _I thought you said it was Mark and Eduardo who had the loud, kinky sex and we should beware any future visits._

_Yeah, him too,_ said Dustin, in his most sad, beaten, put-upon voice, and everyone laughed and then Christy went and put her stuff in Mark's bedroom without even asking, so that seemed to be that.

She stretches out next to him, tangling her legs half with Mark's and half in his down comforter, which is too heavy for a house without air conditioning, but also the only thing that keeps Mark from sleeping on said bare mattress.

"I still can't believe you guys managed to afford this place," she murmurs, seemingly rhetorically, but Mark shrugs; the movement shifts them both.

"It's cheaper when you rent," he offers. Nevertheless, writing that check had been perhaps the most nauseating moment of Mark's life. It didn't matter that the money technically wasn't his (although Dustin likes to joke that it comes from "the Saverin-Zuckerberg conjugal account, ladies and gents, so be sure to ask Mum or Dad before borrowing the checkbook.") He'd never dropped that much money in one place before, not even at seventeen, buying the '97 Corolla that got them out here, more rust than white paint. "It's the perfect location, though, and Steve Jobs lives two blocks that way," he stretches an arm out, takes a moment to consolidate his present position with magnetic north, and twists his wrist to point in the right direction.

She lets out a startled laugh. "That brown house on the corner with the high fence?"

"That's the one. How did you --"

"I know people," she shrugs, humble.

"You mean you know Google."

"I know people on Facebook," she corrects him, and then something around the line of her mouth softens. She crosses her arms over his chest, propping her chin up on them and repeating, even quieter, "I know Facebook."

There's a reverence, a wonder in her voice that curls through the pit of Mark's stomach, warmer even than a compliment or the first hot sip of caffeine in the morning. He lifts a hand to her face without conscious direction from his brain, stroking her cheek with the back of his knuckles, like he can't quite believe her either. It makes her smile, and she pushes herself forward some to meet his mouth again; slow and wet and a little noisy, the way good kisses usually are.

The day that she flies out again is also the day that Dustin and the interns break the chimney ("that's coming out of your security deposit," Andrew sing-songs, and Mark thinks of dollar signs, grimacing, because they don't have enough to spare for trash bags right now and he's got Christy out at the Radio Shack in Redwood City looking for cheap fix-its) and Sean Parker comes banging on the door.

"Well, this is classy," Christy mutters mutinously to no one in particular, brushing shards of broken beer bottle off her suitcase and making a face at the smell. Mark passes her the Febreze from off the top of the fridge and she levels him the look universal to females everywhere, like he's left the toilet seat up or something just as bad. He selectively ignores it.

"Even Sean knows that Eduardo should be here," he tells her, because he and Christy see eye-to-eye on this point in a way that Eduardo and Dustin and even Chris have never quite been able to understand: Sean Parker might just be the greatest thing that could have happened to Facebook. "And he's not."

She plays with the identification tag on her suitcase to give her something to do with her hands, before she lifts her eyes to him. "You know what would make this easier on me?"

"What?"

"If you told me that you wanted him out here."

"I want him here," Mark says immediately.

She studies him.

"I need him here," he adds, a little softer. "For us?"

He sees the moment she's convinced, because there's a shift, somewhere in the way she holds her shoulders and cocks her hip. "Right," she says, brisk, and comes over to hit a kiss in the general area of his mouth, more business-like than tender, and he thinks he just saw the change between Christy the friend and Christy the harpy. "I can do that."

 

-

 

It backfires spectacularly.

"Mark! _Mark, slow down --_ I can't understand you, what's --"

"-- at Sam's Club and you know how they won't let you use credit cards, so I had absolutely no way to pay and I had to leave everything there and we were _all_ furious and frustrated, do you have _any_ idea how utterly mortifying that was?"

" _Mark!"_

He bangs through the side door into the kitchen, not even stopping to wonder at why it's unlocked; everybody in their neighborhood is too busy commuting to the city or working their asses off to try and rob them, it's so boring. Apoplectic rage is probably coming off of him in waves, and it sends the interns and a girl who must be Sean's (insomuch as he ever thinks of them as _Sean's,_ because if you're talking in terms of possession then Mark is fairly certain all the girls own _Sean)_ scattering into other rooms, leaving Mark to face the silent judgment of Andrew's Prismacolor creations.

"He froze the account!" he gets out, near unintelligible with fury and humiliation.

Christy says nothing for a beat, and then, "so ... you're calling me instead of him?"

"Yes, I --" he cuts off as he reaches his work station, yanking open the lid of his laptop with more force than necessary. "Look, can you just get on video chat?"

"Ummm," she drags out, the way people do when they're buying time to assess whether or not they and their rooms are in any state to be seen by another living person, and he breathes out through his nose in a bid for patience and adds, "I've seen you naked, Christy, it's not like you're going to insult my sensibilities. I need to talk to you."

"Fine," she goes, and he gets the dial tone, even as he logs into the beta version of the real-time chat program that will eventually be Skype, given the right amount of corporate magic. 

When the lag clears up, he finds Christy in a tank top, hair drawn back into a ponytail and pinned out of her face with bobby pins, the way she does before she goes all out with her facial-cleansing and make-up routine. Considering it's at least four in the afternoon in New York, this means she probably has some kind of event to get ready for. He blinks right past this, focusing on the way she's leaning concernedly into the screen. He says, "He froze the bank account."

"Yeah, I clued into that somewhere between your spiel about industrial-strength laundry detergent in bulk and the bit with Sam's Club," she goes, dry, and, "what happened?"

"He's gone."

She goes absolutely still, badly lit to the point where he can't quite distinguish the expression on her face. And then she tilts back, folding her arms. "Talk."

Mark drags in a breath and starts from the beginning; the 36-hour coding tear that had him missing Eduardo's arrival at SFO, the subsequent cat fight with Sean, everything that went down in the hallway -- the majority of which caught Mark off-guard, as he was planning on having a head start on fast-talking at Eduardo before he had to excuse Sean's general existence; it takes an hour to get in and out of the city, depending on how much of a bitch the 101 is. Mark recommended flying into San Francisco for that very reason, never mind that San Jose was closer. He _really_ could have used that time. The speech he'd delivered in the hallway -- _it's moving too fast, how's your internship, how's Christy, yeah, she's been crazy lately, and how's that working out for you?_ \-- hadn't nearly been as effective as he'd liked, but he'd thought he'd have another chance once Eduardo dried off and got some sleep. How was he supposed to know that Eduardo would be _gone_ before Mark surfaced from working on the prototype version of the Wall? He'd never just _left_ before.

"And then he cut, shut off your money, and is on his way back to the city and the girlfriend he's sick of," Christy finishes for him, her tone clipped. She's leaning back in her chair, her nose pinched between her fingers; a mannerism she picked up from Mark. "Remind me why setting you on fire is a bad plan."

"That's not remotely feasible, you're on the wrong side of the country," Mark retorts, mostly on autopilot.

"You fucked up," she replies, dropping her hand and fixing him with her best bitchy look. "Mark, short of pumping him full of over-the-counter antihistamines to impair his judgment, I could not have delivered him to you on any more of a silver platter, how did you manage to screw that up?"

_Farm animals,_ Mark thinks, a little stupidly, but he's mostly running on embarrassment and what's left of his pride by this point. He meets Christy's eyes and tries to project all of that with a look.

"I can talk to him when his flight gets in?" she offers after a beat, sounding tired. "This is bigger than you and him and me -- by cutting off your money, he's bankrupting Dustin and Chris and the octopus guy, and none of you can feed yourselves. We both know he's not that spiteful, so --"

"Christy," he interjects. "We're meeting with Peter Thiel this afternoon."

She blinks, and he sees her eyes dart to the corner of her screen -- checking the time and subtracting the three hours of time difference -- before she looks back at him. They stare at the grainy video versions of each other before Christy stretches sideways and snatches her phone up from somewhere off-screen.

"I'm texting him," she goes, before he can ask. She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, thumbs rubbing mindlessly over the keys, and then she meets his eyes again, as searchingly as she can. He likes her best like this, when she's not done up like a caricature of a socialite; she's slightly less frightening without all that mascara, but he's pretty sure it's not his place to tell her that, since whatever she puts on her eyes is none of his business. Mark's brain might also be going off on something of a tangent.

"You want me to burn the last bridge."

It's not a question.

"Please," Mark goes, so quietly there's no way his microphone could pick up on it, but he knows the shape his mouth makes over the word, sees her expression crumple some. "Christy, he needs to be here -- now out of all times. I'll fix it, I'll come clean with him about sabotaging New York for him, I have to." He's promising blindly, he knows that; they wove this trap, him and Christy together, and Eduardo's already skittered sideways, away, and the trap is rapidly closing around them instead. "We can still fix this."

Eduardo needs to be here. If he's got Eduardo in the same geographic location, Mark can do anything.

"When you get the investment --"

"If. Christy, not even Sean is certain about this guy."

" _When,"_ she stresses fiercely. "You text me immediately. I'll -- I'll go over to his apartment, late, without calling, catch him off guard," this is mumbled more to herself than to him. She fingers a stray bobby pin thoughtfully, and then looks right at him again. "While I'm yelling at him about whatever stupid stuff I'm pulling out of my ass, you call him with the important news and beg him to come back there. Okay? _Beg."_

"Yes."

"Yes," she echoes. And then she smiles, a little wobbly, but full, sincere, and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter who you are or what you're doing or how capable you are of screwing something up; for a moment, when there's a woman smiling at you like that, the world is just an absolutely wonderful place. "Now," she says. "You stop obsessing about laundry detergent, borrow somebody else's dress clothes, and go make Thiel's day by existing."

 

-

 

But then Peter Thiel turns his weasel-like profile to them and says, "who's Eduardo Saverin?" the same way Mark's cousins used to look at him blankly and go, "but why is he still here?" whenever he was at their house for high holidays; not malicious, not cruel, just kind of horribly like they didn't care about his existence at all.

_Shit,_ Mark thinks, and that's the sound of the trap closing, the bridges burning, and shit, shit, _shit._ He glances sideways at Sean, who has the decency to look uncomfortable, like he knows exactly where this is going.

The water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold, he reminds himself, and with his closest pantomime of a smile, he turns back to Thiel and the clear-eyed Maurice. And later, so, so, so much later, after his laptop has been returned to him in a ziploc bag and he finally gets to hang up on a very uncomfortable conversation with the police and the father of Ashleigh the underage intern and he's finished going through a half-dozen text messages from Chris and pretending that his heart didn't leap at each one before he realized that it was Chris, not Christy ... 

Yeah, it's only later that Mark figures it out.

Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities make for extremely cold bedfellows.

 

-

 

He says good-bye and thank you to Marilyn one final time and leaves the offices. His car's parked in the underground garage a block down, so he checks his pockets for his wallet and keys and sets off down the sidewalk, at once surrounded by the bustling, busy sounds of weekday Palo Alto. It's not quite full-on dark yet, so there are people out and about in every direction, students and tourists, businessmen and couples, but Mark is all but alone here under the sky, with no company except for the persistent throbbing in his wrist, where Eduardo gripped him so tight he might as well have left his fingerprints on Mark's bones.

"But, no, seriously," says Christy when she picks up, and Mark's not altogether sure how his phone made it from his pocket to his ear, or how it hit redial, just that her voice in his ear is even more satisfying than waking up this morning to find that Erica Albright accepted his friend request. "I'm starting to think I deserve some kind of alimony money, too."

"Don't you dare," he tells her, droll. "I don't think I'm allowed to _exist_ in the general vicinity of my lawyers until I'm at least twenty-five."

"Right," she says lightly. "Well, I guess that just means if you want to be left alone, I'll have to come out there and be your girlfriend, then."

"That won't work, you're taller than me," is what Mark chooses to blurt out.

She laughs for a good long while, high and clear and ringing in his ear, and Mark can't help the smile he aims mostly at the sidewalk, because it's impossible not to be a little proud when you make someone laugh like that, unrestrained and almost joyful.

"Shut up," he mumbles at her more than once, trying to get her to stop, which only sends her off into another fit of giggles. Mark reaches his car before she finally trails off into a more contemplative silence, and right as he's about to break it and probably ask something stupid, she murmurs, "You know, I always thought that I was supposed to be the balance between the two of you."

He doesn't have to ask her what she means. He pauses, hand on the car door, and says, "Christy," the same way he used to say _Wardo_ when he wanted to head off one of Eduardo's uncomfortable truths.

"You meet these two boys, right," she continues, quickly, like she needs to get it out. "And one of them's logical to an almost painful fault and the other is as passionate as yin is to yang, and you look at them and you think they're wonderful together, but they'll burn each other out. And you think to yourself, well, I've got a reasonable handle on both logic and passion, maybe I can temper them. And I thought it was working. I thought --"

"You mixed up who was who," he answers for her. 

"Yes," she answers, a little wistfully.

It's an easy mistake to make, he grants her that, and she wouldn't be the first one to assume it. Given quantifiers like logic and passion, though, and ... well, Mark's never been the logical one, and maybe that's why Eduardo could never just _listen._

He rests his weight against the car frame for a moment, cell phone warm against the shell of his ear, and if he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend he's leaning his head against the ball of Christy's shoulder, like the last time they fell asleep on the Kirkland couch, or up against the hard notch of Eduardo's shoulder blade. Out loud, he says, almost like a confession, "We worked better when it was the three of us together."

It's not a lie, necessarily -- without them, Mark is more successful, more powerful, and Facebook has offices, employees, shares on the stock market, a foothold in the world and Mark will never, never go back to Caribbean night at AEPi and he will never have to beg in a quiet hallway, but ... is he _better_ without them? He's not so sure about that one.

"You'll be fine," Christy answers easily, and he thinks of the capable, surefire way she said, _is there anything we can do?_ while he outlined Facebook's expansion on the very first night they met her, and the way she'd murmured, _I know Facebook,_ in Mark's bed in the Webster street house, and then there's a fierce kind of affection ballooning up inside of him, a hard splintering pressure on the insides of his ribs like his heart doesn't quite know what to do with it, like his chest isn't built to contain it.

It bleeds out into his voice when he says, "I'll talk to you later, Christy."

She makes a surprised noise, and then she's saying, "yeah, you too," swift like she needs him to hear it before he hangs up, and that's all Mark wanted. To save _something._

He thumbs the end call button, smiling, and tosses the phone onto the passenger seat. He slides into the car, checking the visor for his visitor's parking pass and then the clock, and yeah, there's enough time left to stop by the office before the general manager goes home for the night, although he'll probably have to drop in on both Legal and PR first and get them to fax the law offices for copies of the settlement. There's a lot of work to be done on the site, still, and Mark doesn't want to miss a moment of it.

 

-

 

The part of the story that Marilyn is missing is this:

It began, not so very long ago, in a cab in a city they didn't belong in, with Mark and Eduardo pressed up against opposite windows, bickering fierce and bitter about Sean's metaphors, out of all the _stupid_ things they could have taken away from that dinner, while Christy dozed sleepily and the cab driver looked kind of like he wanted to be somewhere else. She woke up, finally, rubbing at the imprint of Eduardo's suit fabric on her cheek and asking, _which one of you has the key?_

They had one hotel room, two queen beds, because it was cheaper, and please, it wasn't like Mark had any sense of privacy and if Christy wanted to have sex with her boyfriend, well, whatever, Mark got there first and it wasn't like he didn't already know what they sounded like. 

Eduardo let them in, and Mark went to collapse face-first onto his bed while Christy and Eduardo moved half-heartedly around the bathroom, doing whatever bedtime routine they've been doing since they were children. He listened to Eduardo brushing his teeth and Christy running water in the sink, scrubbing her make-up off; all normal sounds, all familiar sounds, the sounds of best friends, not of co-conspirators or co-founders or business partners, just friends. He could fall asleep to sounds like those.

He didn't, though, instead levering himself up and getting off the bed. He padded over to the bathroom, catching Eduardo bending at the waist to spit into the sink and Christy with a hand towel, smiling to herself. He stood in the doorway as she reached out, catching Eduardo's chin when he straightened and leaning in for a kiss. It was less of a kiss at first, and more them just pressing their smiles together for a moment, unhurried and sleepy. It turned into a kiss as Mark watched, one hand on the doorframe and their suitcases at his back and someone's TV on too loud in the next room over.

He remembers, later, that it was like his brain shut off.

Although, that's not correct, because a mind like his didn't shut off, ever, but it narrowed down, focusing on that one point of contact, and ... it was kind of like that split second when you reach out to catch a falling object; before he knew it, he stepped right into their space, crowded between toilet and shower and counter like all hotel bathrooms, and laid a hand across Christy's hip.

She broke away from her languid lip-lock with Eduardo, lifting her eyebrows at him in a curious gesture, like she thought that maybe Mark needed to use the toilet, or was going to bum a cigarette off of her, or something.

And then she must have seen something on his face, because her smile widened and she turned partway towards him, saying, "Hey."

"I know," he answered, as he always did. He slid his hand up the hourglass curve of her waist, pulling her in. Her mouth tasted like Eduardo's toothpaste, sharp as crystal and clear water, and underneath that, like the apple martinis they had; Christy was left-handed and Mark right-handed and they'd elbowed each other all dinner, mixed up whose drink was whose, and gave up and drank from whatever glass was closest and Mark thought maybe he could taste that, him and her and Eduardo.

Speaking of.

"Um?" Eduardo said, from, like, right there. "Um, excuse me."

Mark and Christy moved as one; hand darting out, she snatched a fistful of Eduardo's undershirt and used it to tug him in flush with them, and Mark broke away from her mouth to reach Eduardo's. He inhaled against Mark's cheek, sharp and surprised, and Mark bit at his bottom lip in an impatient bid to get him to open his mouth, which worked. Eduardo's sound of protest went muffled, swallowed, and Christy laughed like she'd been tickled.

"You really don't like not having something he has, don't you?" she asked Mark, and he made a face at her, even though, yeah, okay, so it was Christy he texted the day after the bathroom about whatever connections she had at Yale, not Alice, but Mark had no social graces, everyone knew that.

"Do I get a say in this?" Eduardo wanted to know.

"70/30," Mark answered, and Christy threw her head back, laughing, and even Eduardo cracked a smile, fond and amused, and this was going to work.

"Do you know how successful we're going to be?" Christy murmured, gripping them both around the waist. "Do you know how big The Facebook is going to get after this?"

"Facebook, just Facebook," Eduardo retorted, automatic, and then his mouth twisted, like he'd been tricked into saying it, which, whatever, he walked right into that one.

_This is going to work,_ Mark thought again, smiling helplessly, and then had trouble deciding which mouth was nearer, because he really, really needed to kiss someone right then.

("We don't really fit," he announced later, completely aware of how precariously close he was to the edge of the bed, like yawning empty space at his back. Queen beds weren't designed for this, that was kind of a letdown.

"Shut up, yes we do," Eduardo answered, pushing himself up onto his elbow to lean over Christy and kiss him. "Yes we do," he repeated, like a promise, and Mark chased it back into his mouth, Christy laughing between them.)

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
